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“There was nothing positive about this. My head lowered. My stomach sank. What had I done?“Julius recalls an incident involving the family pet and auto repair.

“I can’t remember what happened next, only my father coming in with a bowl of water, him yelling, and the unbearable stench of smoke.” Microwave mishaps befall Mara and Yasmine.

“As if things can’t get any worse…they do.” Read Vayda’s accountof signing up for P.E.

“My hands were shaking and my heart was pounding so hard that I could hear it.” Rachel shares a story of anxiety.

“There I was lying flat on the ground— eyes widened as if the world had just flashed before them—and to me— it was.” Learn why Vivian was so upset.

“The whole thing seemed like it was in slow motion.”Caitlynnarrowly avoids disaster.

Note that the Newsweek columns are based on interviews, written in first person but by a third party who had talked with the man or woman who had actually had the experience.

In class, we discussed how our favorite mistakes would be different: ours would be personal narratives, written in first person by the student who had had the experience. For this assignment, our goal would be to show the event in more detail than the news magazine columns had, in a way that the reader could feel what the writer had felt.

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“Mistakes are painful when they happen, but years later a collection of mistakes is what is called experience.” — Denis Waitley

Making mistakes can be frustrating, but we can grow from them.

Newsweek magazine has a regular column called “My Favorite Mistake” in which people of note are invited to tell about mistakes they are glad they have made because the mistakes taught them valuable lessons or gave them insight they wouldn’t otherwise have. In class, we’ve read about the favorite mistakes of violinist Joshua Belland Congressman Jason Chaffetz.

Now it’s our turn to write personal narratives about our favorite mistakes and what we learned from the experiences. Perhaps some of those essays will appear in our blogs.